In the sixteenth century it became the custom for cultivated Japanese people of a certain social status to enjoy the rituals of the tea ceremony. The quotidian act of preparing a cup of tea for a visitor was raised to the level of art, with meticulous care lavished upon the unique goal of entertaining one's guests. 

The tea ceremony encompasses all the individual arts of the West.  In addition to painting and dance, there is sculpture (in the shape of the porcelain bowl), music (in the sound of the water on the boil) and architecture (in the form of the tea ceremony arbor). These disparate elements intertwine, coalescing to form a single, perfect whole.

NMRL will inherit the technology that will be forgotten in the process of modernization and further improve it. They aim to firmly believe that "old materials are the latest", and focus on how ancient, medieval and modern materials and techniques can be reused and inherited into contemporary architecture. The latest attempt, they believe, is to create a building that deals with old materials while avoiding the zeitgeist.